British Sunday schools were a significant tool of religious socialization and education, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. Thomas Laqueur's foundational work, Religion and Respectability (1976), demonstrated their significance in working-class communities. He argued that ‘the period 1780–1850 witnessed the birth of a working-class culture that was deeply rooted in that ethic of education, religion and respectability which was embodied in the Sunday school’.Footnote 1 Likewise, Hugh McLeod concluded that ‘the overwhelming majority of working-class children went to Sunday school … [and] … many middle-class children attended Sunday school too’.Footnote 2 A Gallup poll conducted in 1957 found that 90 per cent of participants had attended Sunday school as a child, 73 per cent regularly.Footnote 3 Likewise, research conducted by Hugh McLeod (1996), Sarah Williams (1999), Dorothy Entwistle (2001) and others has demonstrated that a majority of those interviewed had attended Sunday school at some point in their lifetime.Footnote 4 The importance of Sunday schools can be also attributed to the role they played in educating the masses. Before the passing of the Education Act in 1870, Sunday schools were one of the few options children had to receive some form of education. As Frank Prochaska has observed, ‘without the Sunday schools and charity schools, millions of children would have grown up without any formal instruction’.Footnote 5 From 1870 they were increasingly freed from the burden of teaching scholars to read, and emphasis shifted to helping form faith in their scholars and directing them into the churches.
However, the experience of Sunday schools from 1900 to 1939 is under-researched by historians of religion. For instance, Philip Cliff's study, while informative, has just two brief chapters concerning the period.Footnote 6 Laqueur's work only examines the work of the schools until around 1850.Footnote 7 Additionally, his conclusion that the Sunday schools were largely the domain of the working classes has been challenged by Malcolm Dick and Keith Snell. Dick argued that teachers at the schools did not come from a working-class background.Footnote 8 Likewise, Snell concluded that while some teachers were drawn from the working classes, most were drawn from higher social classes.Footnote 9 These studies provide useful insights into the social conditions within which the schools operated, but they do not detail the experiences of those involved with these institutions. More recent publications by Mark Griffiths and Naomi Stanton (now Thompson) have examined the work of the schools during the twentieth century.Footnote 10 However, Griffiths focused upon the origins of the schools in the eighteenth century in relation to the outreach work of the churches with children in the twenty-first century.Footnote 11 Stanton's research highlighted the challenges the schools faced from the 1940s onwards in regard to the emerging emphasis upon youth work in Britain.Footnote 12 Only briefly did either consider the history and experience of the schools between 1900 and 1939.
Many scholars have attributed great significance to the schools, yet do not provide evidence for their conclusions.Footnote 13 Additionally, when Sunday schools are discussed by historians, however briefly, they are often heavily critiqued. For instance, Jeffrey Cox concluded that the schools were an ineffective tool for imparting religious knowledge, because of large classes and a lack of discipline.Footnote 14 Likewise, Simon Green asserts that the teaching at the schools was ‘of course … rarely sophisticated’.Footnote 15 These judgements have led many other scholars simply to paint all Sunday schools with the same broad brush. Historians have failed to explore or challenge these conclusions. This is a significant oversight in the historiography of the religion of this period. This article aims to demonstrate the important role Sunday schools played in exposing, educating and forming the Christian faith of much of the British population. It also shows that the schools attempted to professionalize their work and that they were more sophisticated than some historians have previously suggested. To explore these themes, I have consulted the records of individual Sunday schools, often held in local record offices, as well as local newspapers. Additionally, the records of the National Sunday School Union (NSSU), an interdenominational organization formed to support the work of Sunday school workers and teachers, and of denominational Sunday school organizations have been utilized. These sources, taken together with other publications, give a fuller picture of Sunday school life in early twentieth-century Britain.
Teaching at Sunday Schools
Before the passing of the 1870 Education Act, Sunday schools were one of the few forms of education open to many children. The idea of the Sunday school was not new. During the eighteenth century many individuals set up small Sunday schools, such as Miss Harrison in 1765 in Bedale, North Yorkshire and Miss Ball in 1768 in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.Footnote 16 The institution grew under the influence of Robert Raikes in the 1780s,Footnote 17 who formalized and popularized the Sunday school concept.Footnote 18 Raikes's inspiration came from observing poor children misbehaving in Gloucester on Sundays.Footnote 19 For him there was a simple solution: he appealed for women to teach children to read and to instruct them in the Church Catechism, in order to keep them off the streets.Footnote 20 Cliff asserts that from the outset the schools aimed to provide education for the masses.Footnote 21 Griffiths argues that Sunday schools started primarily as Bible teaching institutions, and also suggests that the purpose of child evangelism emerged as an unintended consequence of Raikes's work in Gloucester.Footnote 22 It appears that the schools fulfilled an array of purposes. This is perhaps why they were so popular: they could respond to a range of different needs. By 1787 Raikes claimed that more than a quarter of a million children were attached to the institution.Footnote 23 Attendance peaked during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 24
With the passage of the 1870 Education Act, Sunday schools increasingly became about religious education rather than secular education.Footnote 25 This, however, did not diminish their important educational role in working-class communities. John MacKenzie suggests that Sunday school libraries and prizes provided poor children with access to literature they otherwise would not have had.Footnote 26 In 1923 David Lloyd George argued in the Sunday School Chronicle (an interdenominational magazine for Sunday school teachers) that ‘the university of the people is the Sunday School. Think of what they learn there. The quality of the knowledge is higher and better than anything they get elsewhere.’Footnote 27
Sunday school workers aimed to introduce their scholars to the Bible, Christian doctrine and hymnody. Curricula throughout the period between 1900 and 1939 appear to have remained consistent in content. Schools that were affiliated with the NSSU worked through different books of the Old and New Testaments over a period of six years, to cover most of the Bible using the ‘British Uniform’ or ‘International Lessons’.Footnote 28 These were produced by the British Uniform Lesson Committee which was associated with the World Sunday School Association and the NSSU.Footnote 29 Denominations and organizations were encouraged to adapt the courses to suit their scholars and theological positions.Footnote 30 It is difficult to gage numerically how widely these lessons were used, although records of individual schools from across the country indicate that a wide range of schools did so.Footnote 31 Church of England Sunday schools, however, followed schemes developed by their own Sunday School Institute, not those provided by the NSSU. The Sunday School Institute voted annually on which books of the Bible would be taught, and prepared lesson material accordingly.Footnote 32
Teachers were also encouraged to include lessons on missionary work.Footnote 33 The Sunday School Institute encouraged its schools to teach their scholars about the Prayer Book and catechisms. For instance, in 1905 it began to devise a four-year curriculum which included teaching from the Bible alongside catechisms, the Prayer Book and church seasons for schools to use.Footnote 34 The NSSU, through its publication, the Sunday School Chronicle, strongly encouraged workers to give lessons on temperance.Footnote 35 After the First World War, schools were provided with suggested lessons for Remembrance Sunday.Footnote 36 Sometimes, however, the curricula were not well received. In 1919 the Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School General Committee recorded that there had been dissatisfaction with the content of the morning sessions, which appeared to be nearly identical to the afternoon sessions. This was felt to be too repetitive for some scholars who might attend twice on a Sunday.Footnote 37
During the twentieth century, Sunday school organizations increasingly sought to improve their work by embracing developments in the fields of pedagogy and child psychology. Prominent members of the NSSU such as George Archibald Hamilton and Emily Huntley gave lectures and wrote articles which encouraged teachers to take the ‘study of the child’ seriously.Footnote 38 Hamilton was inspired by the work of Friedrich Froebel, whose father and uncle had both been both Lutheran pastors.Footnote 39 As Meike Baader has argued, Froebel's research, published in the late nineteenth century, ‘laid chief emphasis upon the importance of the child, upon self-activity as the basis of the method of all instructions, upon natural interests as the initial point of all instruction’.Footnote 40 Froebel recalled memorizing Bible texts, hymns and the Catechism.Footnote 41 Despite the important role they had played in his life, however, he believed that ‘church songs are not adapted to the understanding of children’.Footnote 42 Archibald Hamilton seems to have popularized the use of Froebel's methods amongst Sunday school and church workers.Footnote 43 He and other prominent members in the Sunday school movement argued that the most effective way to embrace the findings of child psychology studies was introduce a system of ‘grading’.Footnote 44 Known as ‘the Graded Movement’, this method of organization argued that children should no longer be taught lessons as a whole school. Psychological research had found that children moved through distinct stages during their childhood. Children aged five and aged ten were very different; therefore, they needed lessons which were tailored to their age group.Footnote 45 Scholars were to be separated into smaller classes by age. The integration of such methods into the life of the Sunday schools suggests that they were not as unsophisticated as some historians have suggested.
Schools gradually adopted this new system of organization.Footnote 46 By 1907, the Church of England Sunday School Institute was encouraging all its schools to teach children in accordance with their age rather than having one lesson for the whole school.Footnote 47 In later years they also provided advice as how to split the school and what should be taught in each age group.Footnote 48 Grading, however, was not taken up by all schools and some protested at its introduction. Cliff has suggested that the introduction of grading contributed to the splitting of the committee which wrote the ‘British Uniform Lessons’.Footnote 49 Letters to the Sunday School Chronicle in 1932 complained that the system was causing decline.Footnote 50 Less experienced teachers may have felt uncomfortable with taking smaller classes by themselves, in contrast to the old system which had offered them an opportunity to learn from more experienced volunteers.Footnote 51 Additionally, during the first half of the twentieth century, Sunday school attendance was in decline.Footnote 52 Clive Field estimates that there were 6,978,159 scholars in 1901,Footnote 53 but that by 1939 this number had fallen to 4,177,000.Footnote 54 The introduction of grading in 1906 made it an easy scapegoat for some teachers.
Alongside these developments, there was also an increased emphasis on teacher training. Stanton argues that in the face of declining attendance, Sunday school organizations became preoccupied with training their workers.Footnote 55 Leaders within the Sunday school movement feared that professionally trained day school teachers would be compared to their untrained workers.Footnote 56 It was suggested by the NSSU that all teachers should be trained in how to use the Bible in their lessons as well as in the principles of pedagogy and child psychology, so that their teaching would be more effective.Footnote 57 The NSSU founded a training college for teachers, Westhill in Selly Oak, Birmingham, in 1907 and the Church of England Sunday School Institute soon followed, opening St Christopher's College in Blackheath in 1909. Increasingly, some Sunday schools started to offer training classes for their teachers, and sought to make attendance at these classes compulsory for all teachers.Footnote 58 However, it was recognized that not all teachers could attend these lectures or classes, and Sunday school organizations and the schools themselves provided alternatives for those unable to participate. For instance, the NSSU offered a correspondence programme, with different courses for teachers to study, which culminated in an examination.Footnote 59 Likewise, the Sunday School Institute also offered correspondence courses to their teachers, including options on Sunday school organization, practical teaching and child study.Footnote 60 These attempts to educate and equip teachers demonstrate the Sunday schools’ attempt to professionalize their work, suggesting that the schools were not as stagnant as some historians have argued them to be.
Sunday Schools and Education Acts
The responses of Sunday school organizers and teachers to the passage of the education acts during the first half of the twentieth century have been overlooked. Rather, historians have tended to explore the responses of church leaders and politicians.Footnote 61 During the period between 1900 and 1939 some in the Sunday school movement expressed their displeasure at the passing of the series of education acts. This arose in part from long-standing tensions between the established and non-established churches. Nonconformists had been forced until 1868 to pay tithes and contribute to church rates.Footnote 62 However, the provision and oversight of education, including the licensing of teachers, had remained under the control of the established church.Footnote 63 James Munson has contended that by this time the Nonconformists were strongly committed to the school board system. The boards had educated many Nonconformists and given ministers opportunities to engage in political work in their towns.Footnote 64 Any change to this system was not going to be well received in Nonconformist circles. The 1902 act dissolved school boards and created local education authorities, which would be managed by county councils and county borough councils.Footnote 65 Nonconformists and others also opposed proposals, such as one which would give rate aid to all denominational schools, which was viewed as offering a permanent subsidy to the established churches in England and Wales and to the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote 66 Some Sunday school teachers viewed this provision as nothing other than an attempt to reinforce the Church of England's control of education. For example, an article in the Sunday School Chronicle argued that ‘all who have studied the Government Bill must be aware that this principle has shaped it from beginning to end. It is in truth a Bishops’ Bill.’Footnote 67 Likewise, some individual Sunday schools voiced their dissatisfaction at the act. Teachers at Splott Road Baptist Sunday school in Cardiff objected that those not belonging to the established church had not been given a voice or a vote concerning the act; they felt that it would hinder their scholars from entering the teaching profession.Footnote 68
Other education acts, such as those passed in 1918 (raising the school leaving age to fourteen) and 1921 (consolidating previous acts), were similarly unpopular with many involved in Sunday school work, especially those who felt that their work was being undermined. Indeed, Prochaska has argued that the expansion of the government into education, traditionally provided by the churches, contributed to Christian decline through a dilution of religious teaching as the state encroached upon the monopoly of Sunday schools regarding religious education.Footnote 69 Day school teachers with professional training were increasingly set against Sunday school teachers who were volunteers. State provision of education could be blamed for the decline in Sunday school and church attendance. In 1918, the Sunday School Chronicle published an article in which an interviewee expressed the fear that ‘the new education act will tend to empty Sunday School and Church still further’.Footnote 70 In 1922 another article argued that with the introduction of compulsory education, Sunday school teachers ‘felt sorely handicapped in the competition with the standard set by the professional teacher, and not unnaturally felt ill at ease when their pupils were comparing their Sunday treatment with the precision of day school manipulation’.Footnote 71 As Stanton suggests, the education provided (or subsidized by) by the state surpassed what the Sunday schools could offer. Moreover, most parents were satisfied with the religious education their children received at day school.Footnote 72 The provision of religious education in day schools in part explains why the influence of the Sunday schools declined in twentieth-century Britain. The state had simply put them out of a job.Footnote 73
However, not all those involved in the Sunday school movement saw the 1902 act in so bad a light. Rather, some saw it as providing an opportunity to provide their scholars with a better education. Revd Allan Cameron concluded:
Their Sunday school teachers and their churches were much indebted to the work done by the teachers in our public schools. The great aim of Sunday school work was not so much to fill the minds of the children with learning as to make them grow up good, Christian young men and women and good citizens.Footnote 74
Others felt that the schools could support the work of the state. Ernest Hayes, a prominent member of the NSSU, argued in 1930 that:
To-day the State has rightly assumed the responsibility of the education and physical care of the child, and helps him in adolescence in vocational and recreative directions. But what the State is doing would be much better done, and a great deal added to it, if those carrying on Raikes's work in the Sunday schools took a zealous and well-informed interest in these so-called secular matters.Footnote 75
Even the Sunday School Chronicle embraced the opportunities that came with these changes for Sunday schools. One writer remarked:
When the State has definitely and finally placed the sacred duty of the religious training of the young upon the Home and the Churches, … [they] will be required to make more of their Sunday Schools, financing them and equipping them with greater liberality, supplying them with more teachers, and contributing of their best to their best investment.Footnote 76
There was thus a feeling amongst some Sunday school workers that the education acts made their work more important, not less. In turn they hoped that this would mean that the churches would put more effort and resources into the schools.
The Churches and Sunday Schools
During the period between 1900 and 1939 relationships between the Sunday schools and the churches were not always harmonious. The archbishop of Canterbury's Committee on Sunday Schools in 1912 concluded: ‘the last reflection suggested by the returns is that Nonconformists are making their Sunday schools a success because they believe in them while amongst our clergy a large number regards them as a necessary evil, and perhaps the majority have no ideals whatever in connection with them’.Footnote 77 Some in the Sunday school movement also believed that the churches were not doing enough to support the work of the schools. For instance, a NSSU publication claimed:
we still find the Sunday school movement despised and neglected by Christian people who ought to know better. Too often Church officials and members are absolutely indifferent to the work being done among the children and it is customary to regard the Sunday school as beneath the support of respectable middle-class people.Footnote 78
Those in leadership positions in the churches did not always appreciate or value the work of the schools.
Some of these tensions may have arisen from the fact that running a Sunday school was a costly venture. Sunday school prizes and gifts were the some of the biggest financial drains on the schools. Revd A. Lawley told one of Charles Booth's researchers that he valued Sunday schools, but when he had first taken the church over it was £3,000 in debt because of the spending on treats and prizes.Footnote 79 However, the main source of tension was control. As Stanton and Griffiths highlight, the schools had started as a venture that was independent from the churches.Footnote 80 Some were concerned that children would attend Sunday schools rather than church services, and, as the bishop of Exeter, Archibald Robertson, argued, ‘it would be looking for far too much from the Sunday school to expect of it any kind of substitute for Church going’.Footnote 81 It was only in 1918 that Easter Day communicants surpassed Sunday school attendance in the Church of England,Footnote 82 and until the mid-twentieth century Sunday school attendance generally surpassed church membership in most Nonconformist denominations.Footnote 83 Moreover, although it was not the intended purpose of the schools, Griffiths has suggested that they became indirect recruiters for church membership,Footnote 84 and Thompson and Doreen Rosman indicate that there was an increasing expectation from the churches that Sunday schools would provide them with new members.Footnote 85 As Rosman has highlighted, however, many of those who passed through the Sunday schools did not become regular worshippers.Footnote 86 When scholars did not transfer into membership, frustration was expressed in the churches. Thompson's analysis strikingly inverts this problem: ‘the fact was that the Sunday schools were successfully engaging large numbers of young people well into the twentieth century – but the churches were failing to attract them into Church membership’.Footnote 87
There was, nonetheless, an improvement in relations during this period. In 1903, Randall Davidson, the archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a glowing review of the work of the Church of England's Sunday School Institution:
I have no hesitation in saying that I regard the work promoted by the Institute as of absolutely paramount importance at the present moment. … knowing as I do how faithfully and effectively the Institute has laboured for many years past in facilitating that work, and providing help to teachers and scholars alike, I shall be thankful to know that it is now obtaining the increased support and encouragement which it eminently deserves.Footnote 88
The Church of England's Church Assembly Report on Religious Education in 1929 concluded: ‘The Sunday School has sometimes been regarded as a necessary but burdensome and expensive part of the organisation of a self-respecting parish. It is coming to be used and enjoyed as an opportunity for one of the most effective kinds of service.’Footnote 89 Similarly, also in 1929, the Wesleyan Methodist Church praised its Sunday Schools, affirming that ‘we have wonderfully efficient organizations and institutions in the Sunday School … . The influence of all this work is magnificent’.Footnote 90 Slowly throughout this period Sunday schools, rather than being on the periphery of the churches, became central to their work. These examples also illustrate that the churches believed the work of the schools to be effective.
Conclusion
This article has argued that Sunday schools played a significant role as the educational arms of the churches. The statistics concerning the schools at the beginning of the twentieth century demonstrate how widely children attended the schools. This was where many children were exposed to Christian hymnody and doctrine. The article has argued that rather than being unsophisticated, the education offered at the schools attempted to expose scholars to the Bible, Christian faith and doctrine and missionary work. Sunday school curricula were produced for teachers to help guide their scholars through the Bible and included lessons about other themes, such as missionary work. In the early twentieth century, these curricula were adapted according to developments in pedagogy and child psychology, and scholars were separated into age groups. Moreover, Sunday schools did not remain stagnant in their methods: Sunday school unions and associations (and to some extent their teachers) were prepared to experiment to provide the most effective education for their scholars. However, these changes were not always greeted with enthusiasm.
Sunday schools saw their monopoly on education, especially religious education, challenged with the introduction of a more comprehensive system of compulsory schooling. Some teachers felt that this would benefit their work as they could focus on providing children with a religious education. Some also believed that these changes would result in more support from the churches. The article has also considered some of the tensions that arose between the churches and the schools. There were issues regarding the cost of the schools but also regarding their control. Nevertheless, during the first half of the twentieth century the churches increasingly supported the work of the schools and believed it to be an important part of their work rather than a burdensome venture. Sunday school teachers and those within the churches felt that the schools were offering a good religious education to their scholars. The evidence presented challenges the widely held assumption by historians that the schools were ineffective tools of religious socialization. Sunday schools played an integral role in educating a large proportion of the British population in the tenets and language of Christianity. They deserve a more thorough appreciation by historians of religion.
